Carbon nanotubes in drug delivery: focus on infectious diseases

Carbon nanotubes have the potential to address the challenges of combating infectious agents by both minimizing toxicity by dose reduction of standard therapeutics and allowing a multiple payload capacity to achieve both targeted activity and combating infectious strains, resistant strains in particular. One of their unique characteristics is the network of carbon atoms in the nanometer scale, allowing the creation of nano-channels via cellular membranes. This review focuses on the characterization, development, integration and application of carbon nanotubes as nanocarrier-based delivery systems and their appropriate design for achieving the desired drug delivery results in the different areas of infectious diseases. While a more extensive toxicological and pharmacological profile must be obtained, this review will focus on existing research and pre-clinical data concerning the potential use of carbon nanotubes.